A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

by David Gates

  He gets into the driver’s seat, his bottom warmed by Aunt Lissa’s leftover heat, and sticks the key in the ignition. If he were to drive away, she’d be fine here: all she’d need to do is go back inside and call Henry. Who of course would make her call the police—no, call the police himself, so you’d want to get off at the next exit and take back roads south, as far as Poughkeepsie maybe, where you could be a good boy and leave her car at the train station.

  He backs out of the parking space. Experimentally. Drives a few feet toward the entrance ramp, stops, puts it in Park and races the engine while giving the wheel little turns, playing with how it would feel to do this. Probably incredible.

  A Secret Station

  At a decent interval after his seventy-first birthday, Martine sat him down: she was leaving him, moving to New York. To be with a man he presumed she’d met at that conference—last fall, had it been?—from which she’d returned two days late, after supposedly seeing friends and taking in the new production of Così at the Met. She would come up a couple of days a week to teach the rest of her classes, then figure out what next. She would ask for nothing in their settlement. Well, no blame to her: if she lived to be ninety, as more and more people were doing, she had half her life ahead. “The one thing I swore not to do,” she said, “was to be trite and ask you to understand.” Oh? Had she not also sworn to forsake all others? But he couldn’t very well get on his high horse about that.

  When the spring semester ended, he went in and told Jack Stephenson that he was retiring. Jack had been urging this for years—“You could get back into research,” he would say or, “You and Martine could travel”—but now he said, “Are you sure this is the time?”

  “What’s this?” He sniffed. “The sweet scent of compassion?”

  Jack shook his head. “I just don’t want to have to replace you with some twerp out of Johns Hopkins.” This was Jack giving himself airs: Who from Johns Hopkins would come to a state university so far from civilization, with a hospital that looked like a parking garage?

  “You’ll bear up,” he said. “With what you’ve been paying me, you can hire two twerps.”

  “There’s that.” Jack frowned at the computer screen on his desk. “One second. Let me deal with this idiocy.” He hammered at the keyboard with his index fingers, stopped, nodded and clicked the mouse. “Sometimes I wish I were back tapping old ladies’ knees with a rubber hammer.” He took a deep breath, held it, let it out. “Since we’re being frank, I have to tell you, I do have some concerns. I know it hasn’t been an easy year. Do you really want another change in your life just now?”

  “Aren’t you the soul of delicacy. They ought to have made you dean long ago.”

  “Whoa.” Jack raised a hand as if to protect his face. “I’m not your enemy, Don.”

  “It’s a moot point anyway,” he said. “I’ve decided to become a Doctor Without Borders.”

  “You can’t be serious.” In fairness to Jack, Martine hadn’t gotten this joke, either. “Well, I mean, of course there’s nothing worthier. But, my God, you’ve been in the classroom for what? Longer than I’ve been here.”

  “I do like the way you put things.”

  “Don. With all due respect, I’m not quite seeing you as Mother Teresa. Couldn’t you assuage your conscience by volunteering at a clinic once a week?”

  “The still, small voice,” he said.

  Jack looked at him over the top of his half-glasses. “You have lost your fucking mind. Okay, look, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to keep your office as is. You go off and think this over, and when you’re ready to—”

  He held up both hands. “Will it save time if I tell you I’m not interested in what you’re going to do?”

  Jack took off his glasses and laid them on his desk. “Don, are you talking to someone?”

  “A higher power?”

  “I can suggest a very good—”

  “You’ll have to excuse me. I hear that still, small voice calling.”

  “Always smarter than everyone,” Jack said. “I’ve never doubted that you could dance rings around me. But, just as your friend—and if I’m out of line here you can tell me—isn’t it possible that you’re well out of this thing?”

  “I suspect ‘marriage’ is the word you’re looking for,” he said. “If you don’t mind, I’ll be dancing off.”

  —

  They’d planned the trip back in November, at Red Fish Blue Fish, the one decent restaurant in town. Dinner was on Martine: the English Department had just made her a full professor. It helped to think that at this point she hadn’t fully decided to leave. Paris, Amsterdam, Prague, then on to Rome—to visit his daughter and her husband—and finally to Crete for the first three weeks of July.

  “Can people still go to Jim Morrison’s grave?” Martine had said. “In Père Lachaise?”

  “I have no idea,” he said. “He was the singer, was he not? I wouldn’t have thought he came up to your idea of a poet.”

  “He didn’t,” she said. “He was just the most beautiful man who ever lived. Present company excepted.” She broke off a morsel of bread and dipped it into the saucer of olive oil. “So, will Claudia be her usual intransigent self?”

  “You’ve met Claudia once. In ten years.”

  “QED,” she said.

  “At any rate, we’ll only be there for two days.”

  “I guess I shouldn’t complain,” she said. “I am a home wrecker. Wasn’t that the draw for you in the first place?”

  Before leaving for the airport, he flushed away all but one of his last Viagra samples; then he flew across the Atlantic next to Martine’s empty seat. In Paris, he swallowed the last pill and, for the first time in his life, picked up a prostitute: a tall, broad-shouldered young woman made taller than him by spike heels that had her on tiptoes. “So you know,” she said as she took his hand, “I am not a twahn-nee.” What a world: Did they now have trainees? He instructed her in what he liked but found that he no longer liked what he liked. In Amsterdam, he drank a bottle of wine with dinner, had a brandy afterward, and went to a coffeehouse and smoked marijuana, which he hadn’t tried since a party on the night Robert Kennedy announced that he was running for president. That had been pleasant and silly; this overwhelmed him. He couldn’t imagine what was happening to him—could it have been laced with something? When he managed to get back to his hotel, he spent what he believed to be hours lying on his side on the white sexagonal tiles of the bathroom floor, unable to raise himself to do his vomiting in the toilet. In the morning, he put the bathmat and the towel he’d cleaned up with in a plastic valet-service bag and took a taxi to the airport. Instead of continuing on to Prague and Rome, much less Crete, he flew back to New York, paying fifteen hundred dollars to change his ticket. In a Portosan off the bicycle path along the Hudson, he feasted on a street boy—artfully unshaven, hair artfully mussed—who must have been able to tell he’d never done this before. The boy let loose in his mouth, then beat him, took his wallet and kicked him with the snakeskin cowboy boots that had been the pretext for their conversation. In the emergency room at St. Vincent’s, he told the young woman doctor that he was a doctor, too; she slipped him an envelope with a few Percodans to hold him over until he could get to an oral surgeon.

  —

  Back upstate, he arranged to rent the main house to Karen Friedman, a neurology resident who’d been his most promising student two years—no, three years—earlier, and her partner, as the expression went, a dumpy older woman named Gloria, who managed the Staples store at the mall out on the bypass. He put the Volvo away in the barn and covered it with a blue plastic tarpaulin. (Martine used to say the car made her feel like a “doctor’s-wife impersonator,” which was why she’d picked it out.) He drove his Jeep up the hill behind the house to the cabin that he and Nathan had built the summer Nathan turned sixteen: their last father-son project. A couple of years ago, a contractor had installed a woodstove and a composting privy. Elec
tricity came through a series of hundred-foot orange cords, the first plugged into the outlet down on the back porch, the last connected to a power strip for the computer, coffeemaker, microwave, mini-fridge and a combination radio/compact-disc player. The cabin had served as a guesthouse and a—what term wouldn’t be pretentious?—a place to do his taxes. He stacked split cordwood between the trees around the cabin, making a meandering wall with a gap by the front door. On a tree along the steep path down to the house, he hung a clapperless bell and a large eyebolt so visitors could give warning.

  Jimmy Huggins, whose office had been across the hall from his, took over the reconstruction of his mouth. The choice was between implants (now the “gold standard,” Jimmy said) and bridges, which would involve grinding down undamaged teeth on either side of the extractions. In the meantime, since they knew him at the family-owned pharmacy on University Avenue, he phoned in a Percodan prescription to the Rite Aid in the mall, using the name Kaspar Hauser.

  He had brought a single carton of books up from his library: Anthony Powell, Simenon (to see if he could get his French back), Patrick O’Brian, the Oxford Shakespeare. He hadn’t read Shakespeare since Princeton—half a century ago—and how could you stand before God without having tasted the best His world had to offer? (He now allowed himself God thoughts: intellectual integrity was no longer worth the vigilance.) Sitting in the Morris chair, he worked through Lear again, but Othello turned out to be a bit close to home.

  He filled gallon plastic jugs, ten at a time, at the kitchen sink and carried them up in the Jeep. He had a blue enameled basin, a handsome thing Martine had bought, for doing dishes, rinsing with mouthwash (brushing was still uncomfortable), shaving and washing above the waist. Saturday night was bath night, as in his childhood; after the girls went into town, for a movie or for dinner with whoever their friends were, he walked down to the house, filled the claw-foot tub that Martine had restored and poured in their perfumed bath salts. If they knew, so be it: he was turning into a strange old man. Percodan was no longer doing the trick, so Kaspar Hauser had been put on Dilaudid. He moved his bowels in the privy—because of the drugs, he supposed, he’d had to resort to laxatives—but pissed on the ground, like Adam. Sometimes he would unplug the power strip, fling the end of the orange cord out the window and let the cabin float free.

  He had given thought to the possibility of AIDS and decided that it was unlikely. His mouth had been bloodied only afterward, but he had swallowed the boy’s semen, not knowing what else to do and not wanting to seem, well, unaccepting. So he drew a sample from his arm and sent it to the lab. The negative result, of course, meant nothing: he would have to take another sample in six months or so. He made a note on the December 31 page of his appointment book: Draw blood.

  One Saturday night, early in the fall, he went upstairs after his bath, the towel around his waist, smelling of roses and remote on Dilaudid, his old man’s dugs swinging. In the master bedroom, he took a pair of Gloria’s black lace underwear from the top drawer of what had been his dresser. They were so large that the scalloped rim slipped down to his buttocks. He tried to imagine himself inhabiting the bulky, penis-free body that would fill them up—“panties” was the word—but couldn’t quite cross over. He lay down on the bed and turned on his side. He’d got so lanky that his knees banged together. He put a pillow between them and reached into the panties to handle himself, to make his disgrace definitive, but the poor thing was dead and perhaps this made his disgrace definitive. The curtains were open, the shades up, and he saw the leaves of the maple tree suddenly brighten to orange. Headlights: the girls coming home. He would let himself be caught, and that disgrace would set him free. But it was only someone passing by.

  —

  His first wife had been a nurse: this was back when such arrangements were countenanced. Wide hips, full breasts, a fondness for musicals and Dave Brubeck. She thought he looked like Brubeck, and in those days, before Martine had urged laser eye surgery on him, he might well have. Angela had had a bad habit (he’d never called it to her attention) of prefacing statements with “Truth to tell.” He could no longer remember what they’d talked about, late in the night. She had stopped working when she began to show and stayed home to raise Nathan, then Claudia. Another age of the world. And, years later, the younger woman, the son hanging up the phone, the weeping daughter telling him she would never have a family. How could all this—“tedium” was the word for it—have given any of them either pain or joy?

  He had saved lives. At first he’d tried to keep count—could he ever have been that young?—but these were lives that any doctor could have saved. Once, when he was still in practice, he was on emergency-room duty and they brought in a teenage girl: some fool woman, a hairdresser of all things, had thought she knew how to perform an abortion—it was that long ago—and afterward he had put the girl on the Pill. Half a year later she came to him in his office, pregnant again; insanely, he had given in, risking not just the loss of his license but, in those days, a charge of murder. When the girl came to him one more time, he turned her away, and that same night—or so he’d taken to telling the story; it was really the following night—she died in the ER, of an overdose of Nembutal. Well, any doctor of his generation had such stories. She was a homely, overweight girl named Cheryl—Robinson, she had told him, but it was actually something else—with pimples on her forehead. She smelled. He had looked into it a little afterward; he had been that young. The parents were divorced; the mother had a boyfriend and what was then called a drinking problem, and she’d taken out an order of protection against the father. All three, apparently, had beaten the girl. Cheryl Robinson had been sixteen, ten years older than Claudia. And now Claudia was old enough to be Cheryl Robinson’s mother. Although she had chosen to be no one’s mother.

  The night after the girl died, he had told Angela that he’d had enough of practice and meant to teach full-time. And he suggested that they adopt a child. “This is a turnaround,” she said, and poured herself more wine. “So why did I get my tubes tied?” The next day—and it really was the next day—he made a date to get together with the receptionist who’d been flirting with him. Since she, too, was married, there would be no complications.

  Martine had been his sixth adventure, if that was the word: of this he had kept count. He’d been seated next to her at a dinner party after she’d arrived at the university as the new specialist in the Victorians. Did she not find them a little stodgy? “Everybody thinks that,” she’d said. “The Victorians were hot hot hot. Of course, it was all encoded. You should come in when I teach ‘Dover Beach.’ ”

  “I warn you,” he said, “I’m a hard sell.” He saw Angela looking at them from across the table.

  “I’ll sell you,” she said.

  He sat in the back of her classroom among the undergraduates, who had stared at him when he came in, and listened as she lectured.

  “ ‘Begin, and cease, and then again begin, / With tremulous cadence slow’? I mean, what does this sound like, boys and girls?” Her black T-shirt fit so snugly that he could see the nipples of her small, unbound breasts.

  “Intriguing,” he said afterward, when they’d ordered their drinks. “But weren’t you taking things somewhat out of context?”

  “What is context?” She took off her narrow black-framed glasses and cleaned the lenses with the bottom of her T-shirt.

  “Ah. Am I guilty of old thinking?”

  “It’s charming,” she said. “It’s so old it’s transgressive.”

  “Then that’s a good thing, yes?”

  “I have an idea you don’t transgress enough.”

  “You might be surprised,” he said.

  She put the glasses back on, and her face seemed prettier again. “Oh, I don’t mean that. Of course, you do have a reputation.”

  “Have I?”

  “Or else I wouldn’t be here with you. I like a woman-hater every once in a while. It might be fun to take your cherry.”
<
br />   “Well,” he said. “If you think you’re man enough.”

  —

  There had been an ice storm the night before he was to go in for the last, most difficult extractions; he scraped away frost to look out the window and saw the bare trees silvery with sunlight. Apparently he had brought wood in last night, a kindness for which he was grateful to himself. He opened the draft and built up a fire. His skin felt raw, as if he had a low-grade fever.

  He swallowed a Dilaudid with his coffee and turned on the radio, to a secret station he had found: “music” that was simply noises and drumbeats, about guns and money and women, and where even an old man, provided he was by himself, was allowed to listen in on all the rich obscenity. Bitches on their knees, black men chanting about what the bitches must do.

  He heard the bell ring and turned the radio off. When he opened the door, he felt the cruel air and saw Karen, in her black leather jacket.

  “It’s cozy in here,” she said, stepping inside. She unwrapped her red scarf, unzipped the jacket. A pretty and delicate young woman—a gamine, she would once have been called—with short black hair.

  “Could I get you some coffee?”

  “Maybe I’d better take it along? We should allow some extra time because of the roads. If fact, can we take your Jeep down to my car? The path is all ice.”

  “I still don’t think it’s necessary for anyone to drive me.”

  “They’re going to put you under,” she said. “This is not discussable.”

  He’d tried to research the interaction of Dilaudid and Pentothal. Not ideal, but probably all right. “Why don’t I drive us there at least,” he said. Her little Japanese putt-putt had only rear-wheel drive. “And you can drink your coffee. Can you drive a standard shift? Assuming it becomes necessary.”

  “All dykes can drive standard,” she said. “It’s in our DNA.”

  At the stop sign, he put on his turn signal to take the shortcut and crept down Breakneck Hill Road in first gear, steering from one patch of sand to another. His quietude was deepening now; the ice had bent the trees on either side, making the road a tunnel. When they came to the curve, he felt the Jeep become a heavy object gliding down, its back end sweeping to the left, and heard Karen yell “Shit!” But then the tires bit into sand, he cut the wheel and the Jeep straightened out and resumed its crawl. In his old life, his heart would have begun pounding now in a delayed adrenaline reaction. He looked over and saw Karen using a Kleenex to mop coffee off the leg of her jeans.